China's Overeager American Censors"Practically every U.S.-owned search engine has caved to the Chinese government's demands that they censor political Web sites in China. But none of them seem to agree on just what sites need censoring."

A proposed new law in Sweden (voted on this week, after much delay) will, if passed, allow a secretive government agency ostensibly concerned with signals intelligence to install technology in twenty public hubs across the country. There it will be permitted to conduct a huge mass data-mining project, processing and analysing the telephony, emails, and web traffic of millions of innocent individuals. Allegedly these monitoring stations will be restricted to data passing across Sweden's borders with other countries for the purposes of monitoring terrorist activity: but there seems few judicial or technical safeguards to prevent domestic communications from being swept up in the dragnet. Sound familiar?

DNA Samples at WIPOPolice entered WIPO headquarters to take saliva swabs from ten employees, after their diplomatic immunity was removed. Reports say the investigation relates to a "smear campaign" against the Deputy Director General.

This weekend, marches and meetings across Germany will protest the overreaction of countries to the threat of terrorism, and the re-emergence of a surveillance state in that country. "Freedom Not Fear" is not a small event: over 20,000 people demonstrated in the last protest in September, and over thirty cities will be taking part in this weekend's demonstrations. The organizers hope to expand across Europe for an even larger protest on September 20th of this year [Update: the date has been changed to October 11th].

What has prompted such a fierce reaction? The core of the protest is anger at the European Union's passing of the Directive on Mandatory Retention of Communications Traffic Data, an EU regulation that mandates all European ISPs and phone providers to keep records on every landline, cell and Internet phone call, every email sent, and every Internet connection session, for as long as two years.